As you know we are all about fun over here and we thought that, on our sixth Fiction Friday Blog, maybe it was time to get you all involved as well. Fan Fiction can be lots of fun and it is even more fun when several people with a common like all join in on a ‘prompt’. A prompt can simply be a phrase, a few words or more around which you must base your story.

This prompt was given to me by a fellow Homeland fan via Tumblr, and was simply the words “Big Game”. At the time the World Cup was in full swing and while most of the fics I read were centered around that, I took my story in an alternate direction and wrote a one-shot involving Brody, Carrie, and the tall, dark, handsome and bearded Navy SEAL team introduced in S3, all playing pool together on base before Brody loaded out for Tehran. I found the dynamic between Brody and the SEAL team that trained him to be an interesting one, and wanted to see that camaraderie and friendship developed further.

Back in April, we posted a short crossover story together which can be found here http://wp.me/p5uTBg-Ig. We are currently working on extending this into something more. This is another layer of the fan fiction world where people ’co-author’ stories. This month’s blog is focusing on this aspect of fan fiction and is a discussion about it.

We wondered how others who co-author might go about it.

Does one person do one chapter and the other does the next?

LilMisfit:

I’ve read fics in the past that have been co-authored and I feel like they’re written beautifully, and I have been in writing workshops where I’ve written a piece and then handed my work to a partner so they can write the next installment and likely take the story in a new direction. I think if writing a comedic or “fluff” fic, working that way would be particularly fun. But in a more dramatic fic with lots of plot points and twists and such, I think plotting it out ahead of time and knowing exactly what your partner plans to contribute to the story, would work better.

TBkWrm:

I’ve heard of others doing it this way, but I doubt I could work like this as I think if you are doing a story together, it has to be mapped out together across all chapters. Continue reading “Jointly and Severally”

It has been remarked and, indeed, I remarked myself recently that one of Damian’s biggest strengths is the ability to say a lot without speaking i.e. he uses his eyes, his facial expressions and body language in general to convey his characters’ thoughts and feelings. I found myself struggling with one of my fan fictions, at a loss as where to take it, when another idea fully formed popped into my head. I had originally intended for it to only be 4 or 5 chapters long, but it ended up being 14 chapters as it took on a life its own. It sprang from the notion of Damian’s ability to make his characters say so much without speaking…from a slightly different angle. Continue reading “Take Route”

In our first blog the Misfit mentioned making “alternative paths” for your favourite characters. You could have them deviate from the canon of the show because you are unhappy with it or just because you want to play around with different viewpoints. This brings us to this month’s blog which is crossing paths i.e. take characters from at least two different universes…say for example Life & Homeland and weave their stories together. Imagine Charlie Crews and Nicholas Brody meeting. They are two characters with similar tortured backgrounds, but who dealt with the aftermath of imprisonment very differently. Charlie was not for being anybody’s puppet and took full control of his life once he had escaped his imprisoned hell whereas, physically Brody may have escaped his cell, but mentally he never did. What would Charlie think of Brody? We also wondered, with the show Billions being picked up, how Damian’s characters on Showtime would interact if their paths crossed. Would Brody and Bobby respect each other or tear the other down? Continue reading “Crossing Paths”